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One of the saddest things in all the world (of retro videogames) is the beautiful, bittersweet Grim Fandango’s odd resistance to being spit’n’polished into a shinier, more modern form for shinier, more modern graphics cards. I’m afraid I don’t have good news for you, at least not yet, but what I do have is a video demonstrating what a widescreen, upscaled GF might look like were it to ever happen, plus news on a group who are trying their bestest to make this happen.

Oh God, if only. Sadly, that was achieved with video editing software and Photoshop rather than a customised version of the game. It shows what might be, but not what is – and that makes me all :( that it isn’t reality. Cat Racing puzzle aside, Grim Fandango is the Lucasarts game that I’m most fond of – primarily for its style and dialogue. I’d love to see it sprawled elegantly across my 24″ monitor at 1920xwhatever, all crisp and gleaming and, thanks to its abstract character-shapes, probably looking surprisingly contemporary.

The folk at Grim Fandango Deluxe are on the case thanks to Residual, a modern, hardware non-partisan interpreter for Grim and Escape from Monkey Island (and a must if you want to play either of those games on today’s PCs), but they’ve run into some pretty big obstacles. To whit,

“1. Textures — We have found a way to increase the texture quality, but we are still limited by the game’s 8-bit palette. Ideally a 16-bit palette would be supported, allowing for better quality textures.

2. Polygons — We have tools to extract the binary .3do files and convert them to text versions or .obj files, but we don’t have a way of converting them back to text .3do files.

3. Resolution — This particular chestnut still needs to be cracked.”

If you reckon you can help overcome any of that, get in touch with the team here. I guarantee you’ll get thousands of internet hugs if you can make a shinier Fandango a reality.

117 Comments

We don’t really need a shinier Grim Fandango, it was pretty darn “shiny” to begin with. All they really need to do is to release the files that’ll allow it to run and let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

When I was young, I bought the game new. I got stuck in the forest, where you have this arrow sign that’s pointing to one area on the floor. I didn’t get it, but I didn’t have internet either, so I send a letter to LucasArts, asking for help. They send a letter back, telling me what to do! Awesome customer service.

Then I ran into the cat racing puzzle and got stuck for several more years, as I didn’t want to bother them any more. I only managed to finish it when a magazine published a walkthrough.

I played the game again last year, and still couldn’t do the cat racing puzzle. It’s horribly difficult.

I actually lucked my way through the cat racing puzzle somehow when i first did it. I replayed it a few years ago and actually did the cat racing puzzle, while understanding it! God knows how i nailed it first time round. Also I’d love to see Grim Fandango get some TLC. Its my favourite adventure game evar

Or Secret of Monkey Island. None took too long to figure out, but a ton of the puzzles in MI1 and MI2 were incredibly senseless and dependent on guesswork. To be fair, there were also some fairly clever puzzles and the games were so damn charming I didn’t mind.

Internet walkthroughs have robbed gaming of one of its most beautiful things. When I was at school there was a puzzle in Monkey Island that nobody could figure out and someone’s older brother had got past by random chance. When one of us finally cracked it it was a grand old day!

Not sure about a FPS remake ( :p ) but I’d love to see Residual play around with implementing a mouse interface. No reason 2.5D adventures can’t still be point & click. Grim is one of my top games, if not the top game, of all time, but when it came out the keyboard controls seemed an unnecessary departure from genre convention and they still seem a little crummy. It’s almost as if they wanted to put it on consoles.

Some game visuals age horribly. Yeah I know, graphics don’t make the game, but if it looks awful, I’m not going to enjoy it nearly as much. Pixel art is a lot more forgivable in that department, it can be timeless, but really blocky and crappy textured 3D is awful (not saying that’s what Grim Fandango is like, just in general).

Final Fantasy VII is one such game that suffers. The actual gameplay (not cinematics) looks pretty terrible. In fact, I didn’t even think it looked good when it first came out. After coming from the beautiful pixel art of FF 6, 7 was just plain ugly.

Being a purist is actually completely counter to the concept of authenticity. People’s desire to play it is authentic, the redesigner’s wish to enhance it is authentic, ergo the experience will be authentic. The only inauthentic thing would be to prohibit people from the choice of playing it in HD or attempt to curb their authentic desire to play it in HD.

I agree, Cunzy. It’s not just that the remakers are very rarely as good artistically as the original artists, but I just think it’s best to leave things untampered with. Which is why I never play with any other mods either.

Thought we were beyond all the sartrean ‘authenticity’ stuff by now. If you just prefer to play the old games with no re-skinning, bells and whistles, etc. then that’s an absolutely fine choice but there’s no need to try and back up this desire with a v. problematic meta-keyword. We really don’t need a gaming version of rockism.

Actually, my argument was FOR playing it with reskinnings and with all the added bells and whistles. In this regard you’re free to do whatever you want as long as you want to do it. Sartrean authenticity is about freedom to do what you find authentic. Even if Sartre had a specific idea about it in relation to music (like he thought that jazz music was more authentic than pop music) that’s not what his actual theory argues for.

I don’t really see the need for an HD remake of Grim Fandango. The papier mache aesthetic was chosen and designed to look good with the low-quality polygons and textures available at the time. If people want to make some graphical tweaks, more power to them, but I’d also be happy just being able to play in Windows 7.

It is not even slightly more natural to interact with items in a room by waddling around like you’re actually mounted on a radio control car, then walking straight into a wall on the way out because the camera angle flipped.

Grim’s controls are bad. Bad bad bad. Baaaaad. It’s good despite that, but it should have been point-and-click because that’s a very simple system that works very well, and whichever idiot thought it needed direct control to be “more 3D” or whatnot needs to be flogged with broken Limbo of the Lost CDs.

The horrible controls probably had a huge part to play in the drama that was bad sales of Grim Fandango. I am really puzzled why they tried the same control scheme/engine in Monkey Island 4, again. You just cannot sit back, relax, canvas a room and click once to interact with things. You have to sit there like a monkey pressing buttons to get where you want to go.

No one liked the Cat Racing Puzzle? I thought I loved it because it every time I replayed it I had to figure it out again. It actually felt like detective work – you had to get the picture, then figure out (from the PAs) what day it was and coax other information out of the characters and the environment as well as the picture to get the exact date you needed to print from the ticket counterfeiter.

Honestly, it felt like a proper puzzle instead of just combining X with Y and using it on Z.

I don’t think it’s possible for a game to give you that, “Aha! Of course! I’m a genius detective!” feeling without creating a puzzle that some people are going to get hopelessly stuck on.

When I was playing Graham Nelson’s classic of interactive fiction “Curses,” I was stuck on a puzzle. I was e-mailing a friend, asking for subtle clues. He said, “Think about the romance novel,” and refused to say more. I floundered for days trying to figure out what I was missing.

Then early one morning I woke from a dream and a certain notion about the novel was in my head, “wait a minute, is that…?” I loaded up the game, typed a few words, and EUREKA! I’M A GENIUS! Still one of my favorite gaming moments ever, but these days, with so many games on my plate, I doubt I’d spend that much time and effort being stuck in one place. I’m probably poorer for it.

I don’t agree. The Thief, Deus Ex and Hitman series managed to make even a bumbling buffoon like me feel really smug about reaching my goal.

Half-Life was creative in its level design, but it only had one path that was glaringly obvious. You wouldn’t get stuck, but you wouldn’t feel clever either. In contrast, the previously mentioned series could afford subtlety by providing a dozen more or less obvious alternatives or clues, thus ensuring that you would run into at least one of them.

Grim Fandango is my favourite game of all time. It’d be the bestest thing ever to be able to run it stably on 64 bit WIndows 7 without all the faffing about that goes with it. Same goes for Blade Runner, while we’re at it. That bloody thing won’t even install on new systems. I’d be very happy for an HD remake of this.

It would be amazing if they released a Special Edition with hi-res graphics, better character models with more polygons and better textures, touched-up backdrops with more colors and better textures and mouse control. That would be a magnificent game for new generations to see what good gaming was about. Sadly, Lucasarts seem to be busy with much less important matters these days.

I don’t get it why LucasArts is sitting on their classics once again, they got it right with the Monkey Island special editions: new graphics, remastered soundtrack, original voice actors, dev’s commentary, instant switch between orignal and SE versions and lots of bonuses plus multiple platfor release including iOS.
They should either keep releasing SE of their classic games like: Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Indy, etc. or release the games on digital distribution fully compatible with today’s PCs. There are a couple of games on Steam, probably the ones that are not worthy of a SE: Loom, The Dig and Indy games so perhaps this was the plan once, but that was 3 years ago.
With retro gaming being so popular today they are missing a great opportunity

Hold up, in a list of Loom, The Dig, and Indy as not worth a Special Edition you were outraged by Loom and the Dig. To quote Darth Vader, “WHAT?”
Altough for some reason i think the dig (and maybe full throttle) could really shine with a special edition. Perhaps because the Art and Style isn’t as iconic as Monkey Island, so a redo would enhance the experience more than detract.
And to op: I don’t call it retro gaming, i call it gaming. (Oh god, i feel old.)

Sorry, my bad, not worthy of a SE to LucasArts, I like the games (The Dig being my least favourite). Perhaps because the originals were not very popular to beging with, they don’t have the huge fanbase of their other titles either.
I know, retrogaming is awful, but people want their pixel art in their phones and laptops, it’s hip.

@sopabuena: Ah, that makes perfect sense. Hell, even if you didn’t like Loom and The Dig, who am I to say otherwise, but I would agree that it’s probably not worth Lucas Arts’ time to remaster them.

@blind_bad_boy: The thing is, . . . well, I never did play Indy, so I didn’t feel qualified speaking up for it. Full disclosure, I haven’t played any Monkey’s Island games, Sam and Max, or Day of the Tentacle either. I know, I know: “WHAT?”

So you walk into a bar in the underworld of Rubacava. The light is dim, a blue cigarette haze filling the air. There is a single microphone on stage. A dead woman recites a poem:

“With bony hands I hold my partner
On soulless feet we cross the floor
The music stops as if to answer
An empty knocking at the door
It seems his skin was sweet as mango
When last I held him to my breast
But now we dance this Grim Fandango
And will for years before we rest.”

They really don’t make ‘em like this anymore. Grim Fandango is the reason I find it hilarious that games like New Vegas get praised for their writing. This is one of the only games that are actually as good or better than most books.

“The moral of every story is the same: we may have years, we may have hours, but sooner or later, we push up flowers.”

It shone pale as bone,
As I stood there alone,
And I thought to myself,
How the moon that night cast its light,
On my heart’s true delight,
And the reef where her body was strewn.

One of the few poems I know by memory. I tried to look it up on Google after hearing it in the game to try to find out who the original author was; I liked it so much I thought I might check out some of the poet’s other pieces. But when all that came up were hits for Grim Fandango, then I realized, and my mind was blown.

I don’t get Grim Fandango. I tried it and it were your standard run of the mill adventure game with some unusual aesthetics and people have the balls to claim it’s the best PC game of all time? Please, don’t make me laugh.

It’s another one of those cases where story and production have trumped gameplay as far as the priority of a segment of the gaming audience (see Bastion last year). Just ignore it, no one else can tell you what the “best game ever” is since what’s important in a game varies wildly from person to person.

You’re right Vinraith. It boggles me how people can keep praising these horrible games like Mass Effect and Call of Duty, but Grim Fandango.. we’ve seen it all before in the countless of adventure games games that came out during the King’s Quest era. I even liked Gabriel Knight much better than I liked Grim Fandango in all aspects of these two games so no – I don’t have a clue.

And no one can tell me that I’m wrong in absolutely loving it. Such are the joys of differing opinions. In my mind it has not only style but substance too. Then again I was always a big Lucas Arts fanboy, just the concept of having a game where I could fail for not picking up some item or other put me right off the Sierra games and while not playing them even now may be obstinancy the Kings Quest era means fuck all to me. When it comes to nostalgia the Lucas Arts games are where it’s at (followed by the Broken Sword series) and that’s something that wont ever change for me. Different strokes for diferent folks and if you can’t at least vaguely understand why Grim means so much to a generation of adventure game players then fair enough, I’ll continue to make you laugh!

I’m with you Kent. I finally completed Grim with my girlfriend last year for the first time and we both really disliked it. Everything about the game was wonderful bar the actual game itself which was marred by awkward controls, a cumbersome interface and illogical solutions. If you don’t care for those things then fine, but we found them infuriating regardless of how good everything else was. I wrote a rather wordy review here.

For the record though, I really liked the cat puzzle because, as mentioned earlier in the comments, it felt like detective work putting the different pieces of the puzzle together. It was clever but made sense.

@Vinraith: I agree with the production values trumping everything else. I’m not sure I agree with regards to Bastion though. Grim made a hash of pretty basic stuff (controls and interface) and while Bastion’s presentation is second to none, the core game is solid and satisfying and does nothing in my mind to let the overall experience down.

In my memory Grim Fandango looks like the second screenshot. I think these is one of the reasons why we need HD remakes, because back then we had different expectations, but nowadays we would compare old games to new games and then we would notice that those rose tinted glasses are the reason why we though they looked so good and reliving the experience feels awkward, like meeting an old friend who no longer have much in common with you. I think it’s really necessary for these new generations to be able to appreciate, with an updated version, the work of art that Grim Fandango is in all its glory.

Thats a good point I agree. Back then you would think this looks amazing but now it still looks good but you think it looks a bit rough around the edges. When I think of Grim Fandango in my mind I don’t remember the rough edges it was all smooth and crisp.

And just to clarify the project’s aims, as this post seems to have confused some readers: all it will do is improve the character models through textures and polygons, and possibly resolution if they can manage it. Widescreen is not currently being attempted, nor anything else.

I’m actually genuinely surprised that we so rarely get game updates. You would think that a lot of these games would sell on name value and nostalgia alone, and that the costs of updating them would be much lower than making a new game – surely these are easy profits?

(I realise of course that there are hurdles like Rights and Assets and Source Code).

There have been a few high profile updates, so I wonder how those worked out financially. (MDK2, Serious Sam HD, and did i hear they’ve just done Halo?)

It seems weird to me that publishers/developers don’t want to get longer-term profits out of their investments. Game costs are approaching those of movies, yet movie (and album and book) makers will continue to receive profits from that investment for decades, if not 100s of years. Movies rarely seem to have any contractual problems when it comes to doing Director’s Cuts or Blueray remasters, so why cant game studios sort it out?

Modern Updates of Deus Ex, Grim Fandango (and maybe Baldur’s gate in 3d) would surely shift a lot of units.

Sheesh, doesn’t anyone at EA (or lucasarts for christ’s sake) pay attention to how George Lucas is continuing to milk fans with his movies????? $$$